Ai Director?

[Keeshhound]

While Update 7's radical alterations to player strength are certainly worth discussing, I find that my thoughts often turn to the problem of Warframe's innate challenge levels, and how wildly they can fluctuate depending on how many people are playing together. Solo play is often extremely challenging, (especially when fighting infested and those endless goddamned floods of chargers) but with four players even levels that are meant to be harsh and painful become much more managable, and with certain group loadouts able to tear through a level without so much as breaking a sweat. I'll admit I don't see much of Eris or Pluto anymore, because for all my Kiliken farming I still haven't found a shield or health mod, but from what I've heard this hasn't changed much; a well modded group can easily run roughshod over most high level stages.

Back in 2008 I, like many other people played Left 4 Dead, and while I was never able to really immerse myself in it as others have, I was struck by the ingenuity of the AI director; as I understand it really just a series of conditions that examined players' health, ammo levels and other factors as the progressed through a level and adjusted enemy and resource spawns to dynamically alter difficulty. If a group was doing poorly, fewer enemies would spawn and health packs would be more common. If they were doing well, the opposite would hold true. If they loitered in a specific area, hordes of zombies would slam their position until they either died off or were forced to move forward.

To bring this back to Warframe, during my long hours of farming Kiliken, praying to the almighty Icosahedron, that cruel and fickle god of chance, I was struck by the way that the new endless defense system served a similar function, albiet in a much cruder fashion. By constantly increasing the difficulty (higher level enemies, spawning in greater numbers), eventually all players will reach a level of challenge they cannot overcome through brute force and tactics. And ultimately this is what I have begun to cherish most about my time in Kiliken; not the simultaneous joy and dissapointment of a rare mod dropping ("Holy S#&$, another multishot mod! That's awesome, but WHY ON GOD'S BEAUTIFUL EARTH CAN'T I FIND A SHIELD MOD!?") but that joy of fighting waves of powerful-but-not-overwhelming enemies right on the cusp of the inevitable wall that I usually hit around wave 25 where the Crewmen are gods and I have to submit or be smited into itty-bitty bits by their divine fury.

It is my hope that by adopting a system similar to L4D's AI Director, that same level of challenge might be more common. Ideally, such a system would track how many players are in a level, their health and how quickly they're moving towards the objective to adjust difficulty on the fly. In the early stages (Mercury, Venus, Saturn) it would be much more forgiving, providing health, energy and ammo drops in greater abundance, but as you move towards the end level systems it would grow more callous and sadistic, until at the endgame planets it's little more than a shark who's scented blood, desperatelly flinging hordes of opponents trying to exhaust you and your allies, and surrendering only the most meager resources you can pry from it's greedy clutches.

Granted, I have no idea if this is truely feasible; L4D used prebuilt levels, meaning that the Director had much more control over where and when to provide aid or to strike players down, as the situation warrented. Still, it's a nice idea to think about.

[Dr-Jelly]

+1. Nice idea. I loved the L4D director. But maybe that's a bit too hard to create right now, so something similiar would do.

[indio68]

yeaa...upvote your idea...evenan improvment to AI...that is the woirst part of the game in my opinion,